An open letter to the President-Elect

Dear. Mr Obama:

I understand you're busy and am grateful you are taking time to read this. I am flattered you like my blog. If you like the music I talk about, then maybe when you and the girls are installed in the White House, I can come visit with my 80g external hard drive full of tunes and we can swap. Just don't tell the Justice Dept how I came by so many songs (ha ha)!

I want to say how I appreciate your taking on the onerous task of the Presidency in this seemingly dark and painful stretch for our country's history. However one voted, both you and Senator Biden, and Senator McCain and Governor Palin, deserve to be patted on the back for such willingness to attempt to lead us now.

I understand that you are going to have a heaping plate full of tasks to attend to, what with the bailouts and the wars and the 28-days-later bug probably escaping the CDC even as I type, but I wonder, since we are cyber-chums, if you could see fit to slip an executive order under the doorjamb for your old pal Nick.

I'll just say it:
Do you think it would be possible to get someone to remix and remaster the 1994 Suede album Dog Man Star?

This is the one where Bernard Butler left, yes, before the whole thing was recorded and Brett Anderson supposedly played some of the guitar to finish it and it is sort of thought of among rock congonscenti as a flawed masterpiece, dark like The Empire Strikes Back?

But, you see, Senator, even when I first bought this (on cassette!) it sounded way too sloppily bottom-heavy, and the vocals are flanged in some dumb Ed Buller way and it just sounds lousy. "Mastered lousy," like Todd Rundgren would say. The end result is, when I occasionally try to listen to it, going in thinking surely it was me who was wrong the other 100 times over the years I have stuck it in the player, I still end up going, "Oh, man, this record would be so much better if you could hear it!"

Even in the Lost in TV Suede video comp, when the commentary track is on, the band members say of "New Generation," "Why does this sound so bad?" as if they had never even believed it themselves! And "It's that way on the record!"

Surely one person's government issued healthcare benefits could be spent instead to right this wrong? You can choose the person, even.

Remember: History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.